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the glasses from him—“Now I can do my job!” she exclaimed—and on and on.

Notes

1. Disability studies may also be in the position to off er signifi cant adjustments to current theories of the gendered and

sexed body. Some of this work has already begun. See, for example, Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic

Davies.

2. Th

is little list runs the gamut of mythologies and realities connected with the representation of the disabled body, from

freak show to mundane to metaphorical, and might serve as a warm-up for thinking about how diff erent bodies transform

language. A specifi c and provocative example of how bodies aff ect the process of representation can be found in the recent

work of transgender and intersex activists (intersex being the accepted term among these theorists for hermaphrodites).

Intersex bodies, David Valentine and Riki Anne Wilchins argue, defy the basis of existing categories, requiring new

languages that seem confusing but more accurately represent their biology. For example, his or her is replaced with hir.

Other examples of new linguistic usage appear in the e-mail signatures of two transgender activists: “[J]ust your average,

straight white guy with a cunt who really digs lezzie chicks like me” and “just your average butch lesbian intersexed white

guy with a clitoral recession and a vaginoplasty who wants her dick back” (218).

3. Disability scholars are currently debating whether people with disabilities were better off before the inception of moder-

nity, and this debate usually relies on the social construction argument. One example among many is found in Davis’s

path-breaking study of deafness, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995): “Th

is study aims to show

that disability, as we know the concept, is really a socially driven relation to the body that became relatively organized

in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Th

is relation is propelled by economic and social factors and can be seen as

part of a more general project to control and regulate the body that we have come to call crime, sexuality, gender, dis-

ease, subalternity, and so on. Preindustrial societies tended to treat people with impairments as part of the social fabric,

although admittedly not kindly, while postindustrial societies, instituting ‘kindness,’ ended up segregating and ostracizing

such individuals through the discursivity of disability” (3). See also Simi Linton, et al., esp. 6; Martha Edwards; Michael

Oliver’s Th

e Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (1990); and James Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History

of Mental Retardation in the United States (1984).

4. Susan Bordo also critiques the postmodern pleasure body, which she calls the “plastic body,” arguing that we cannot always

choose our own bodies. Th

e emphasis on heterogeneity and indeterminacy in recent body theory, she explains, refl ects a

disembodied ideal of freedom. Th

is theoretical trend is not only incompatible with the experiences of people with dis-

abilities; it mimics the fantasy, oft en found in medical models, that the body is immaterial as long as the imagination is

free. See Bordo 38–39, 227–28, 247, and 275.

5. Pain is a notoriously complex issue in disability studies. On the one hand, a focus on pain risks describing disability as

if it were related exclusively to the physical body and not to social barriers, suggesting that disability is only and always

about physical limitation. On the second hand, people with disabilities oft en complain that the social construction argu-

ment denies the pain of impairment and suggests that it can be overcome simply by changing cultural attitudes. On the

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Tobin Siebers

182

third hand, some people with disabilities are not in physical pain and dispute the association between pain and disability.

A politically eff ective theory of pain needs to mediate between these three alternatives. For more on the role of pain in

disability studies, see Oliver, esp. ch. 3.

6. A major exception is Elaine Scarry, who makes it clear that pain is physical, but her own commitments make her work

less useful than it could be for disability studies because she is more interested in describing how physical pain disturbs

the social realm than the individual body. Her major examples of pain are torture and warfare, and these have a powerful

impact on her theory. According to Scarry, pain is a “pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory ren-

dering of ‘against,’ of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within

oneself, it is at once identifi ed as “not oneself,’ ‘not me,’ as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of ” (52).

e subjective eff ects of pain, then, are objectifi ed in the other, and consequently the gap between self and other widens

to the point where it causes an enormous tear in the social fabric. Pain unmakes the world precisely because it usually

lodges the source of suff ering in the social realm. Th

is idea of pain works extremely well for torture and warfare, where

the presence of the torturer or enemy easily embodies otherness, but less so for disability where suff ering has to do not

specifi cally with the destruction of the social realm but with the impairment of the body. Rather than objectifying their

body as the other, people with disabilities oft en work to identify with it, for only a knowledge of their body will decrease

pain and permit them to function in society. Unfortunately, this notion of the body as self has been held against people

with disabilities. It is represented in the psychological literature as a form of pathological narcissism, with the result that

they are represented as mentally unfi t in addition to being physically unfi t. On this last point, see Siebers on narcissism

and disability.

7. A notable exception, important for disability studies, is the feminist discourse on rape; it rejects the idea that pain translates

into pleasure, insisting that physical pain and feelings of being dominated are intolerable.

8. For other critiques of Haraway, see Susan Wendell 44–45 and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder 28–29.

9. When prostheses fi t well, they still fi t badly. Th

ey require the surface of the body to adjust—that is rarely easy—and impart

their own special wounds. My mother wore a false eye; it fi t at fi rst, but as the surrounding tissue began to shrink, it soon

twisted and turned in its orbit, infl aming her eye socket and becoming easily infected. I wear a plastic brace. It quiets the

pain in my lower back, but I have developed a painful bunion, and the brace rubs my calf raw, especially in the heat of

summer. Every user of a prosthesis has similar stories.

10. Haraway, although eschewing the language of realism, makes a case for the active biological agency of bodies, calling

them “material-semiotic generative nodes” (200). By this last phrase, she means to describe the body as both constructed

and generative of constructions and to dispute the idea that it is merely a ghostly fantasy produced by the power of lan-

guage.

11. In 1990, when the ADA was passed, the number of Americans with disabilities was estimated at 43 million. Th

at num-

ber falls well short if one includes the one in three Americans who wear glasses or the 50 million who take medicine

for hypertension. See Linda Greenhouse, “Justices Wrestle With the Defi nition of “Disability” (1999), and also Leslie

Kaufman, who concludes her report on the legal issues posed to the Supreme Court as follows: “If the court decides that

poor eyesight or hypertension are equally limiting, millions more Americans might wake up this spring to fi nd themselves

on the rolls of the disabled.” Predictably, the Court found that 43 million disabled Americans were enough and ruled to

restrict the defi nition of disability established by the ADA. See Greenhouse, “High Court Limits Who Is Protected by

Disability Law” (1999).

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Bodies Th

at Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Couser, Th

omas, ed. “Th

e Empire of the ‘Normal’: A Forum on Disability and Self-Representation.” American Quarterly 52

(2000): 305–43.

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.

Edwards, Martha. “Th

e Cultural Context of Deformity in the Ancient Greek World.” Ancient History Bulletin 10.3–4 (1996):

79–92.

Ferris, Jim. “Uncovery to Recovery: Reclaiming One Man’s Body on a Nude Photo Shoot.” Michigan Quarterly Review 37

(1998): 503–18.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Th

e Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995.

———. Th

e History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980.

Greenhouse, Linda. “High Court Limits Who Is Protected by Disability Law.” New York Times 23 June 1999: A1+.

———. “Justices Wrestle With the Defi nition of Disability: Is It Glasses? False Teeth?” New York Times 28 Apr. 1999: A26.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: Th

e Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hevey, David. Th

e Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Kaufman, Leslie. “From Eyeglasses to Wheelchairs: Adjusting the Legal Bar for Disability.” New York Times 18 Apr. 1999: A1.

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183

Disability in Theory

Linton, Simi, Susan Mello, and John O’Neill. “Disability Studies: Expanding the Parameters of Diversity.” Radical Teacher 47

(1995): 4–10.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation.” Th

e Body

and Physical Diff erence: Discourses of Disability. Ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan

P, 1997. 1–31.

Oliver, Michael. Understanding Disability: From Th

eory to Practice. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Scarry, Elaine. Th

e Body in Pain: Th

e Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Shakespeare, Tom, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies. Th

e Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. London: Cassell,

1996.

Siebers, Tobin. “Tender Organs, Narcissism, and Identity Politics.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Brenda Jo

Brueggemann, Sharon L. Snyder, and Rosemarie Garland Th

omson. New York: PMLA, 2001.

omson, Rosemarie Garland. Extra-ordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New

York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Valentine, David, and Riki Anne Wilchins. “One Percent on the Burn Chart: Gender, Genitals, and Hermaphrodites with At-

titude.” Social Text 15 (1997): 215–22.

Wade, Cheryl Marie. “It Ain’t Exactly Sexy.” Th

e Ragged Edge: Th

e Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fift een Years

of Th

e Disability Rag. Ed. Barrett Shaw. Louisville, KY: Advocado Press, 1994.

Wendell, Susan. Th

e Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Refl ections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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185

On the Government of Disability

Foucault, Power, and the Subject of Impairment

Shelley Tremain

We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested,

has a history. We believe in the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert its

force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past . . . We believe, in any event, that the body obeys

the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the infl uence of history, but this too is false.

—Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

Introduction: Bio-power and Its Objects

In the fi eld of Disability Studies, the term “impairment” is generally taken to refer to an objective,

transhistorical and transcultural entity of which modern bio-medicine has acquired knowledge and

understanding and which it can accurately represent. Th

ose in Disability Studies who assume this

realist ontology are concerned to explain why social responses to “impairment” vary between historical

periods and cultural contexts—that is, why people “with impairments” are included in social life in

some places and periods and are excluded from social life in some places and periods.

Against these

theorists, I will argue that this allegedly timeless entity (impairment) is an historically specifi c eff ect

of knowledge/power. In order to advance this claim, I assume nominalism.

Nominalists hold the view that there are no phenomena or states of aff airs whose identities are

independent of the concepts we use to understand them and the language with which we represent

them. Some philosophers think this is a misguided stance. For these thinkers, objects such as photons,

stars, and horses with which the natural sciences concern themselves existed as photons, stars, and

horses long before any human being encountered them and presumed to categorize or classify them.

Compelling arguments have been made, nevertheless, according to which not even the objects of

the natural sciences (say, photons, stars, and Shetland ponies) have identities until someone names

them.

4

I want to set aside questions regarding the metaphysical status of these objects. In this paper, the

only ontological commitments that interest me are those that pertain to elements of human history

and culture. My aim is to show that impairment is an historical artifact of the regime of “bio-power”;

therefore, I will restrict myself to claims that apply to objects of the human sciences.

Foucault’s term “bio-power” (or “bio-politics”) refers to the endeavor to rationalize the problems

that the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings, when constituted as a popula-

tion, pose to governmental practice: problems of health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, and race. Since

the late eighteenth century, these problems have occupied an expanding place in the government of

individuals and populations. Bio-power is then the strategic movement of relatively recent forms of

power/knowledge to work toward an increasingly comprehensive management of these problems in

the life of individuals and the life of populations. Th

ese problems (and their management), Foucault

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Shelley Tremain

186

thinks, are inextricable from the framework of political rationality within which they emerged and

developed their urgency; namely, liberalism.

Th

e objectifi cation of the body in eighteenth-century clinical discourse was one pole around

which bio-power coalesced. As feminist historian Barbara Duden notes, in that historical context

the modern body was created as the eff ect and object of medical examination, which could be used,

abused, transformed, and subjugated. Th

e doctor’s patient had come to be treated in a way that had at

one time been conceivable only with cadavers. Th

is new clinical discourse about “the body” created

and caused to emerge new objects of knowledge and information and introduced new, inescapable

rituals into daily life, all of which became indispensable to the self-understandings, perceptions, and

epistemologies of the participants in the new discourse. For the belief took hold that the descriptions

that were elaborated in the course of these examinations truly grasped and refl ected “reality.”

Th

e dividing practices that were instituted in the spatial, temporal, and social compartmentalization

of the nineteenth-century clinic worked in concert with the treatment of the body as a thing. Foucault

introduced the term “dividing practices” to refer to modes of manipulation that combine a scientifi c

discourse with practices of segregation and social exclusion in order to categorize, classify, distribute

and manipulate subjects who are initially drawn from a rather undiff erentiated mass of people. Th

rough

these practices, subjects become objectivized as (for instance) mad or sane, sick or healthy, criminal or

good. Th

rough these practices of division, classifi cation, and ordering, furthermore, subjects become

tied to an identity and come to understand themselves scientifi cally.

In short, this “subject” must not

be confused with modern philosophy’s cogito, autonomous self, or rational moral agent.

Technologies of normalization facilitate the systematic creation, identifi cation, classifi cation, and

control of social anomalies by which some subjects can be divided from others. Foucault explains the

rationale behind normalizing technologies in this way:

[A] power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mecha-

nisms . . . Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its

murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from

his obedient subjects; . . . it eff ects distributions around the norm . . . [T]he law operates more and more

as a norm, and . . . the juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses

(medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.

e power of the modern state to produce an ever-expanding and increasingly totalizing web

of social control is inextricably intertwined with and dependent upon its capacity to generate an

increasing specifi cation of individuality in this way. As John Rajchman puts it, the “great complex

idea of normality” has become the means through which to identify subjects and make them identify

themselves in ways that make them governable.

e approach to the “objects” of bio-medicine that I have outlined relies upon an anti-realism that

confl icts with the ontological assumptions that condition dominant discourses of disability theory. In

addition, this approach assumes a conception of power that runs counter to the conception of power

those discourses on disability take for granted.

Generally speaking, disability theorists and researchers (and activists) continue to construe the

phenomena of disablement within what Foucault calls a “juridico-discursive” notion of power. In the

terms of juridical conceptions, power is a fundamentally repressive thing possessed, and exercised over

others, by an external authority such as a particular social group, a class, an institution, or the state.

e “social model of disability,” in whose framework a growing number of theorists and researchers

conduct their work, is an example of the juridical conception of power that predominates in Disability

Studies. Developed to oppose “individual” or “medical” models of disability, which represent that state

of aff airs as the detrimental consequences of an intrinsic defi cit or personal fl aw, the “social model”

has two terms of reference, which are taken to be mutually exclusive. Th

ey are: impairment and dis-

ability.

As the formalized articulation of a set of principles generated by the Union for the Physically

Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), the social model defi nes impairment as “the lack of a limb or

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187

On the Government of Disability

part thereof or a defect of a limb, organ or mechanism of the body.” By contrast, disability is defi ned

as “a form of disadvantage which is imposed on top of one’s impairment, that is, the disadvantage or

restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization that takes little or no account of

people with physical impairments.”

us, Michael Oliver (one of the fi rst proponents of the model)

stresses that although “disablement is nothing to do with the body,” impairment is “nothing less than

a description of the physical body.”

Several interlocutors within Disability Studies have variously objected that insofar as proponents of

the social model have forced a strict separation between the categories of impairment and disability,

the former category has remained untheorized.

Bill Hughes and Kevin Paterson have remarked,

for example, that although the impairment-disability distinction de-medicalizes disability, it renders

the impaired body the exclusive jurisdiction of medical interpretation.

I contend that this amounts

to a failure to analyze how the sort of bio-medical practices in whose analysis Foucault specialized

have been complicit in the historical emergence of the category of impairment and contribute to its

persistence.

Hughes and Paterson allow that the approach to disability that I recommend would be a worth-

while way to map the constitution of impairment and examine how regimes of truth about disabled

bodies have been central to governance of them.

ese authors claim nevertheless that the approach

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